Amanda Wondergem | Visual Designer

🧐 The problem

Borrowell, a web and mobile app, helps Canadians achieve financial wellness with free credit scores, reports and personalized products.

The brand is primarily associated with free credit scores, leaving its broader marketplace of financial products underrepresented. As the company looks to drive revenue growth, elevating awareness beyond free credit scores is crucial to engage users and foster loyalty.

🔎 Research

User trust and confidence: Users need to feel confident that the credit card product will help them build or improve their credit. The ad design should highlight key benefits.
- Design decision: Focused on clear copy around checking credit score and credit card recommendations through Borrowell.
Clear value proposition: Ads should communicate the value proposition upfront, with a focus on the key differentiators of the credit card (e.g., no annual fee, high rewards rate, etc.) to capture attention quickly.
- Design decision: Focused on clear copy around comparing the benefits of credit cards through the Borrowell platform.

🚀 Design approach

Identifying user friction: I flagged potential challenges in Borrowell’s two-step process (signing up for a free credit score, then applying for a tailored financial product), noting the gap between the value proposition and the actual product offering. This disconnect could create confusion and a fragmented user experience.
Balancing stakeholder feedback: Despite concerns, the Marketing team wanted to test the approach quickly to gather insights. They acknowledged the trade-offs and aimed to refine the user experience based on the results.
Ensuring testable hypotheses: To support fast learnings, I worked with the team to establish key metrics (engagement, conversions, drop-offs) to assess campaign success and identify areas for improvement in the user journey.

HTML5 Ads:

Credit cards (300x250, 728x90)

Loans (300x600, 300x250)

Anticipating user confusion: Flagging challenges in the multi-step journey

🚧 Overcoming challenges

This complex value proposition proved challenging to convey in ads and on the landing page. Despite creative efforts, the campaign did not perform well. Limited resources and Engineering support prevented changes, forcing us to work with the existing setup.

Sign up flow: It only mentions free credit scores and is lengthy. It could be streamlined to require just a name and email address. A user could be prompted later in the app or via email to complete the entire flow.
Fragmented user experience: A significant gap exists between the information conveyed in ads and the dashboard post-sign-up. While the dashboard displays a user's credit score and product recommendations, it lacks personalization based on the financial product clicked in the ad.
Specific campaigns: Credit card and personal loan campaigns have higher CPAs due to disassociation during sign-up and more competitive CPCs.

Retargeting ads were more successful in engagement

📊 Iterating

Recognizing these hurdles, I devised a new strategy:

Focus on core value: We continued running successful ads centred solely on free credit scores, a proven value proposition that resonated with users.
Retargeting for engagement: Newly acquired members were retargeted with credit card ads after sign-up, leveraging their familiarity with the platform.

This approach allowed us to maintain the integrity of the sign-up funnel while increasing awareness of credit card offerings through targeted post-acquisition campaigns.

Retargeted new members with credit card ads to leverage familiarity with the platform

🎯 Impact

Increase in credit card vertical clicks

Ads increased app engagement

$7.29

First 30 day revenue

Attributed to Microsoft Ads for credit card and loan products

💡 Key takeaways

Simplify complex messages: Focus on clear, singular value propositions when communicating with users via ads/landing page.

Adapt to technical constraints: Work within existing limitations while finding creative ways to achieve business goals.

Long-term plan: To further enhance our strategy, conduct user research to identify customer pain points in the current flow. Then iterate on the user experience testing different funnels for credit card, car loan and personal loan ads.

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